Happy new year! Our editors on the opinion page like their writers to salt their columns with a personal confession now and then. In the spirit of the season, I'll share something with you. I've been worried about what 2017 will heave into the life of Connecticut.

The news in the public arena feels like it has been running the gamut from worrisome to alarming in the past several years. Then I saw in the fall that our troubles can be solved by building some tunnels under Hartford for all of us to drive through. I am a bit of a skeptic about these magic-wand solutions that always involve spending vast sums of other people's money, but U.S. Rep. John Larson, the veteran East Hartford Democrat, brings considerable verve and some colorful drawings to his idea.

It's not a gag. He's serious. It's fine for one person to busy himself with a dream like this one. The trouble begins when serious people begin to believe that an underground highway is the elixir for a range of challenges that have nothing to do with highways.

We have seen this before in Greater Hartford. Many times before. I'll assume the role of killjoy and call a partial roll of the history of magic bullets.

There was the Learning Corridor in the south end of Hartford. Trinity College was the driving force behind it. It resulted in some people losing their homes for the state and federal governments to build an array of public magnet schools.

The Science Center of Connecticut, originally planned for East Hartford, was supposed to bring miracles to the region — as many local schoolchildren testified to with their pennies, nickels and dimes in the 1990s. The Connecticut Science Center was eventually built in Hartford with vast amounts of public funds and makes a striking-looking sliver on Columbus Boulevard. I don't think anyone would claim it has been the spark plug for reviving Hartford's prospects that its advocates claimed it would be.

We do not need to rehearse the details of the travails of the minor-league baseball stadium that anchors a new Hartford neighborhood to be known as DoNo (Downtown North). It was announced with great fanfare in 2014, was supposed to open in the spring of 2016 and would pay for itself. It should open this spring and has become a burden for Hartford's beleaguered taxpayers.

Interstate 84 as it runs near Aetna in Hartford is elevated and requires rehabilitation. Everyone agrees on that. The state Department of Transportation examined the cost of rebuilding that swath at ground level and found it to be in the $4 billion to $5 billion range. The Larson plan calls for miles of far more expensive tunnels. So expensive that some don’t want make an educated estimate of what they would cost.

What otherwise sensible people seem willing to do is to allow this plan to become a diversion. There is a creeping theory that many of Hartford's problems have been caused by the design of I-84 and I-91 decades ago because they cut through the center of the city, creating barriers and demolishing community bonds. It's easier to attribute Hartford's gathering storm to highways than it is to address the deeper, more demanding issues of poverty, education and the state's economic decline. Those do lend themselves to colorful drawings and magical thinking.

There is hard work ahead for state and local policy-makers in 2017. Reaching a consensus on the way forward will be difficult, perhaps not possible until the 2018 elections. The legislature may fall short of mustering the will to balance the state budget for the next two years without increasing taxes again. They may be at a standstill for months. That would not be the worst result. It would not be worse than looking to a tunnel to solve our troubles.

Kevin Rennie is a lawyer and a former Republican state legislator. He can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com.

This column was updated Friday to correct the cost of rebuilding a swath of I-84 at ground level in Hartford. The DOT has said it would be $4 billion to $5 billion, not in the $10 billion range.